Genic.AI is 4 for 4 on presidential elections

The polls have consistently shown Hillary Clinton with a lead over Donald Trump, and yet, Trump just shocked the media, the polls, and the world with his victory. But it wasn’t a shock to some. Especially Genic.AI – a company that specializes in AI’s to solve complex problems. MogIA predicted his win months ago.

Genic.AI wrote a machine learning AI called MogIA that predicted the primaries and the last 4 elections perfectly. MogIA used 20 million data points from online platforms like Google, YouTube, and Twitter to come up with its predictions. It correctly predicted the past three presidential elections as well as the Democratic and Republican primaries. Now it’s 4 for 4.

“While most algorithms suffer from programmers/developer’s biases, MoglA aims at learning from her environment, developing her own rules at the policy layer and develop expert systems without discarding any data,” Sanjiv Rai, the founder of Indian start-up Genic.ai who developed MogIA, told CNBC. In October, Rai declared that Trump’s social media engagement had overtaken that of Barack Obama’s in 2008 by 25%, foreshadowing a Republican victory on November 8th. The predictions are now true.

Consequences.

It is not just that AI’s are doing complex tasks, it’s that they increasingly doing complex evaluative tasks better than the best humans in the whole world. These AI’s can be written by a few (or just one) persons using off-the-shelf compute. This makes it available to almost anyone – at prices far below the price of an average yearly employee salary. – Me 2014

Some are calling this the Truman defeats Dewey moment for our elections. What happens when several, or even one, cheaply made machine AI’s can now predict the results of huge upset elections months in advance better than thousands of people working at polling companies and the most astute political campaign machines like Mrs Clinton’s? Do those old companies and employees have any value anymore?

What would an election look like if we threw out the usual political rulebooks and went fully into AI guided campaigns? How will the face of online companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google that trade in your postings, opinions, and data shape our elections? How do we protect against their manipulation – such as the case where former Facebook employees admitted to regularly and actively censor conservative news? Or worse, protect against manipulation by domestic/foreign agents that might be able to write counter-AI’s to manipulate postings.

I think we’re very much on the breakthrough moment of AI’s taking over these very kinds of decisions and jobs in our society. I also believe we need to start looking at how to protect ourselves from equally capable AI’s that will attempt to manipulate results (such as we see today with AI bots writing product reviews) and companies that will attempt to skew data.